


grown darker or lighter than it should have been

by sugarybowl



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Post TLJ, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers, the ships are totally negligible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 14:10:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13296534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarybowl/pseuds/sugarybowl
Summary: There is a lie as old as the universe and just as vast. It is easy to remember and even easier to believe.





	grown darker or lighter than it should have been

**Author's Note:**

> My first dive into this fandom, totally off the seat of my pants.

_"There is a lie as old as the universe and just as vast, Ben. It is easy to remember and even easier to believe."_

He is shaken from this thought by the child in front of him, drowning and ridiculous in the heavy drapes of an officer’s uniform she could never fill out. Of all the nameless completely irrelevant officers that could have come to find him today, he knew entirely too much about this one in particular. He knew, for example, that her name was Keeru. He knew that both her parents were low ranking officers, that her father was dead, that he had died just days before the girl’s own birth, and that her mother had stayed her post until the moment the girl was of a mind to come into existence. He knew all of this because he had been there, just hours into his new life with the First Order when an officer had doubled over and gone into the throes of labor, too early they said, from grief.

He had watched from the shadows of an infirmary as the woman was given a choice, to commit her daughter to the tutelage of the First Order or to die and have her daughter sent into the Stormtrooper corps to be raised by droids and drill sergeants. He knew the First Order needed children, even if at 14 he did not recognize one in himself. The First Order could not afford to waste the luxury of children born into their fold, trained from birth to believe in the one true way of the world.  

The girl hands him a communication card with shaky fingers, bowing low, her eyes shining with fear and unironic awe.

“Supreme Leader,” she says as clear and firm as she seems capable.

“Thank you, Keeru,” he answers. The girl reacts as if he’d produced bright fruits with the intention of juggling them and disappears as quickly as she came.

In his regained privacy, he holds the communication card in his own shaking hands. He knows with no edge of doubt what the message will say. What need is there to hear the words be said? He had startled awake, cold and shaking, knowing exactly what had happened. No amount of destruction or meditation could center him once again, set adrift as he had been, even though everything that his quarters had contained was now mangled and shattered beyond recognition and he had sat in silence for hours on end. There was no helping it, the echoing chasm at the core of him where once - quiet and constant - she had never left him.

The image of Dameron becomes clear and he braces himself for the contempt. The man is broken and angry, the words he speaks seemingly dragged out of his throat like skin over sandpaper.

“May this message be received in the spirit of peace in which it is sent,” Dameron begins, his voice raw and edged with anger. No doubt he thinks this is a terrible idea, both tactically and morally. Still, he continues. “It is my most terrible duty to inform you of the death of General Organa. Her final order was that her passing be communicated to your person with dignity and respect, and that both invitation and safe passage to any memorials or ceremonies held in her honor be afforded to her only son. The Resistance will honor her wish and command, so long as the spirit of peace is upheld.”

The message cuts off abruptly. He is left in the roaring silence of the words and their careful construction. He wraps himself in the machination of it all, the severed difference between “your person” and “her only son”. The inescapable implication that Kylo Ren should be informed of his enemy’s death and Ben Solo invited to mourn his mother’s loss.

-

Rey’s hands drop the heavy dark jeweled collar she had been struggling with for what felt like half a day. Leia had asked her to take every jewel and precious thing. Rey had been baffled, never having been able to even imagine trinkets and gems.

“Use them like weapons,” Leia had told her while she smiled indulgently, “armor yourself in them when lightsabers and blasters aren’t the way. In any case, Poe would not carry them half so well.”

Leia had been a princess, her arsenal of extravagant jewelry was vast, but one small trinket she’d held tightly before pressing it into Rey’s hands.

“This is for Ben,” she’d said, fervently and tired and heavy of breath, “for Ben.”

Rey understood and nodded eagerly. The small piece of carved wood held in a leather string was for Leia’s son, not for Kylo Ren.

Now, Rey’s chosen piece for the night lay glittering and forgotten at her feet as the voice she had secretly begun to miss blossomed low and quiet in her mind. She could see him, clear as day, sitting on her bed though she knows that he isn’t. Knows that he must be lightyears away and yet looking just as he does now, cracking and pained.

“It’s no crown’s jewel,” he says, of all things, as he nods towards the fallen collar. “He stole it for her, he was always stealing things for her and sending them. He rarely bothered to come to her himself.”

She understood instantly then, just as she’d understood Leia on her deathbed. Just as she’d understood Luke although admittedly too late.

“You came,” she whispers.

“Just outside of range,” he says although he looks away.

“Come down,” she urges, “no one will say anything.”

“They will say plenty after I’ve left,” he half shouts, standing and pacing like a broken footed bird.

Rey sighs and paces after him, “Who cares, then? She wanted you here-”

“No,” he snaps, turning abruptly to her, “She wanted her son to come back from the dead. She wanted to force him out of a grave by falling into hers.”

Rey could help it, if she wanted to, reaching out and running her finger tips over the back of his hand, “She didn’t want to die, Ben-”

“I am not _Ben_!”

“Ben,” she says again, wishing the connection or herself were strong enough to grab him by the arm and shake him, “you can’t expect me to believe Kylo Ren is sitting out there with no weapons or guard ships to mourn General Organa’s death.”

He stares down at her fingertips still hovering just above his hand. He stands with the vibrating energy of one who is about to wreck everything he can reach out and take and yet, he turns his hand over to have their palms press skin to skin. Rey cannot say when her eyes fell closed, but she needn’t open them to know he is no longer there.

She looks to the small box where the carved wood piece sits and thinks _it’ll keep_. Until Ben comes back to himself, or until one kills the other, or maybe inevitably forever; it will have to wait.

-

Finn’s hands are a comfort that he had no concept of needing until it suddenly, unbidden and perfect, was there. They held him, tight and firm when he crumbled to absolute pieces at Leia’s final breath. They were to be found, tentative but present on his shoulder or his back or his arm every time he made to call for her, to turn and ask her permission or her advice on the matter of her own services. It is only by the grace of Finn’s hands, Poe tells himself, that he’s made it through this while still being able to stand.

The series of memorials and ceremonies held for the General are heavily guarded by a slowly recovering Resistance and by at least a dozen compliments of unaffiliated militaries come to pay their respects. Politics are whispered while praises of the General’s never-ending fight and ever-present grace are shouted and sung for three full days.

Poe isn’t surprised in the least that Ren never shows his face, but he is most relieved. It had been the General’s last request and as much as it made his blood boil and his stomach turn he would have stood it, if only for her. Still, it’s no surprise that there was not so much as a reply. If there is anything that he finds surprising at all, it’s that the ceremonies are more public and indiscreet than he’s comfortable with and there has yet to be any threat of impending disruptions from the First Order fleet.

Perhaps, somewhere in his shriveled heart, Ren found it in himself to afford his mother a measure of peace – at least in death. He felt it like a stab in the heart every time the thought came back to him, Leia’s death. He remembers her smiling through her frustrated eyes, telling him that there was no X-Wing he could jump in to blow up old age in. Privately, superstitiously, he blamed her brother’s death. They had been twins after all, maybe the General wanted to follow close in death when they had in life stayed so far away. At the very least, he finds a small comfort in knowing that she didn’t waste slowly away, when the pain and fatigue came it took her quickly, giving her just enough time to set her affairs in order.

He honestly cannot wait until this is all over and Leia can be left to rest, finally, to rest. But of course, something had to go wrong. The First Order shuttle is allowed through after several checks as to its lack of weapons or accompanying ships. It’s a tiny thing, hardly bigger than a pod, with a shockingly tiny occupant. Rey is up the instant the ship docks and back down the moment the small figure exits it. Poe doesn’t need to be Force sensitive to sense the disappointment radiating from her when the occupant obviously isn’t Ren.

“I know her,” Finn whispers right close to his ear, warm breath tickling at his neck, “what the – I know her, I know that kid. She’s…like fifteen.”

Poe stands now, along with everyone, in plain curiosity at this First Order child come to them unaccompanied. She looks, well, she looks terrified – but her chin is held as high as the dark leather folio is held to her chest. It’s an almost humorous image, like a schoolchild wandering into a gathering such as this on her way to school.

She comes to stand before the three of them, who have been given places of council and honor that made Rey and Finn nervous but made Poe heart-warm and proud.  

She stands before them, swallowing hard and taking a steading breath.

“I am Midshipman Keeru Zhet of the First Order,” she says with measured practice, “it is my duty to deliver Supreme Leader Kylo Ren’s respects-”

“His respects-”, Poe spits out, before Finn’s hands are there once more, strong and steady on his shoulders.

Rey steps forward and it’s clear to see it takes all that the little girl has to hold her place when a known Jedi approaches her.

“Thank you,” Rey says, awkward and diplomatic in her heavy collar and stuffy dress, “and what is this?”

 The girl takes another deep breath and continues, “I come in the spirt of peace to deliver a few words on behalf of the Supreme Leader.”

The word peace does not go unheard. Through the multitude of mourners, some are more content and others are horrified. An envoy of peace? What sort of games is the First Order playing at? The send a child? Isn’t that an insult?

Officer Zhet holds her stance with solemnity and calm while the crowds continue at a dull roar.

Rey offers the girl a smile and nods, “Go ahead.”

After another even deeper breath, the young officer opens the black folio and begins.

“I will not disrupt the proceedings with my presence or words. These are the words of General Leia Organa, formerly of the Republic, last Princess of Alderaan, by which she should be remembered,” the girl says, a mouthpiece for the ghosts of the dead and the stubbornly lost, “ _There is a lie as old as the universe and just as vast. It is easy to remember and even easier to believe. It goes like this: that the Dark is Dark and the Light is Light._ ”


End file.
